A few days after I started work at the Mercury, I heard that two councillors from my old South Tyneside patch had made a few phone calls to politicians here in Leicester.

Iain Malcolm, deputy chairman of a lobbying firm, and David Potts called various public figures in the area and dropped a word in their ear about me, warning them about the digging I’d done on the shambolic Labour administration and the supine Tory opposition leader.

I treated it as a badge of honour.

Several local politicians down here were a little more curious, however, and over the past few weeks they’ve carried out their own background checks into the pair. They started, naturally, by browsing through my previously-published news stories.

“From what I’ve now discovered,” one high-flying politico chuckled to me this week, “they deserved everything you gave them!” The rest of the responses were similar.

That’s the problem when you’re an ousted Parliamentary candidate who helped a chemical attacker avoid prison.

Your views don’t have that much clout anymore…